DuckDuckGo has become the go-to choice when it comes to using a privacy-friendly search engine. In fact, its growth has been constant during the last decade, reaching tens of millions of search requests a day. This growth has received a strong momentum in 2021 having been almost 47%.
If in October In 2018 we reported that DuckDuckGo had about 30 million searches daily, that number has now risen to approximately 100 million, which is not bad for a competitor that is quite small than Google, a giant that has clearly dominated the search engine market in the last two decades at least in the West, and is that, despite the doubts generated by the Google policies, it cannot be denied that their search engine is still the best, especially when you want to find very specific things from specialized fields.
The growing popularity of DuckDuckGo is primarily aimed at increasing privacy awareness. The search engine has shown throughout its existence that it does not track users, although it does show advertising related to the keywords used in searches. Obviously, from somewhere it must obtain financial resources to continue operating, and advertising is one of the most used means, but luckily DuckDuckGo does not make any user profiles.
At the technology level, to build its search index it uses its own spider called DuckDuckBot to crawl websites and receive data from partners such as Wikipedia and Bing, but they do not use data from Google. Of course, to guarantee the protection it offers at the level of privacy, it would be better to avoid using highly questioned browsers such as Google Chrome.
The growth of DuckDuckGo has allowed it to embark on other projects, such as an Android application tracking protection system, an email protection service and more recently a web browser for the desktop, albeit in the latter case you have chosen an approach that will not appeal to everyone.
Finally, and despite the omnipresence of Google, there is a remarkable number of neutral search engines, among which are Qwant, MetaGer and Startpage apart from DuckDuckGo. More recently, Brave has joined the competition, developed and maintained by the same company responsible for the Chromium derivative released as free software. Brave Search is more independent by using unique and proprietary results, while DuckDuckGo relies on Google’s Bing and Qwant results.
